The Peter Attia Drive - #95 - Luke Bennett, M.D.： The emotional, cognitive, and physical demands that make Formula 1 a unique and special sport

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.480 my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.800 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health

00:00:24.600 and wellness full stop. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.

00:00:28.880 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

00:00:33.280 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level at

00:00:37.320 the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. My guest this week is Dr. Luke Bennett. Luke is the medical and sports

00:00:55.200 performance director for Hinsa Performance, a company focused on human wellbeing and athletic

00:01:00.620 performance with a particular emphasis in motorsport. Luke received his medical degree

00:01:05.880 as well as his master's degree in sports medicine at the University of Queensland.

00:01:09.340 He then spent seven years training in intensive care before working for six years in remote

00:01:15.100 emergency aeromedical retrieval with the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Western Australia. Something

00:01:20.860 that we actually talk about in this episode that despite knowing Luke, I didn't know this about

00:01:26.260 him and didn't understand what that meant. I wanted to interview Luke because I talk a lot about my

00:01:32.180 interest in Formula One, my passion for it. And I realized that a lot of people who listen to this

00:01:38.600 podcast might not fully understand why. And I thought that no one could do a better job explaining

00:01:44.800 some of the ins and outs of it the way Luke could. And he does a really great job of that. Again,

00:01:51.400 you can come into this without having ever watched a Formula One race or finding any interest in it.

00:01:57.320 And I think you're going to come away from this thinking, wow, you learned a lot and you have a

00:02:01.160 greater appreciation for the sport of Formula One. What makes it special? Why it's so emotionally,

00:02:08.060 cognitively, and physically appealing. We talk a lot about Luke's background. We do again,

00:02:12.940 an overview of F1, including the races, the driving, the unbelievable travel and physical

00:02:19.180 and logistics and sleep constraints and everything that are placed on all of the drivers and the teams.

00:02:25.320 We decided to release this episode specifically to coincide with the release of season two of the

00:02:31.320 Netflix documentary series, Formula One Drive to Survive, which just came out on February 28th.

00:02:38.400 And if you haven't seen season one of that, I recommend going and watching that first. I think

00:02:42.920 I binge watched it in two days when it came out. Can't recommend this series enough. Does a really

00:02:48.640 good job of showing you not just the drama of what happens on the tracks, but perhaps more importantly,

00:02:53.660 the drama of what happens off the circuit. My hope is that if you're not a fan of F1,

00:02:58.840 this will give you a great overview of the sport, why I love it so much. And if you're already a fan,

00:03:03.640 you're definitely going to enjoy this. So without further delay,

00:03:06.640 please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Luke Bennett.

00:03:12.920 Luke, it's so good to see you, man. Thanks, Peter. Back in Austin, huh?

00:03:18.020 Yeah. And thank you for making time. We had spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out how we were

00:03:22.140 going to make this happen with your schedule, because obviously you have more important things

00:03:25.420 to do than sit here and goof off with me. So I really appreciate you making time. That's why we're

00:03:29.980 doing this so late at night. No problem. We got the races the other way around this year with

00:03:34.600 Mexico and Austin. So we actually had a free day beforehand. It worked out well.

00:03:38.280 So let's start with the most interesting thing on your CV, and we're going to get to a lot of

00:03:43.300 things that you do, but tell me what a flying doctor is. The Royal Flying Doctor Service of

00:03:48.840 Australia is pretty unique. I don't think there's anything like it anywhere else in the world,

00:03:52.460 even considering the continent of Africa. Western Australia in particular is a state that's about

00:03:58.140 the same size as Western Europe. It has only 2 million people by way of population and only really

00:04:03.580 one. And one of those is, I mean, most of them are in Perth, right? Exactly. So all of the clinical

00:04:07.420 services essentially are in Perth. And it's actually more economical for the health system to fund an

00:04:14.800 aeromedical retrieval service by fixed wing aircraft for the entire state, rather than building and

00:04:19.500 funding hospitals around. So it's this huge expanse with a vibrant sort of mining industry in particular,

00:04:27.240 lots of underprivileged indigenous communities, a big tourist industry during the winter months, and

00:04:32.340 all sorts of crazy action happening out there. And a couple of these flying doctor bases where you'd

00:04:38.340 have a crew of a doctor, a nurse, and a pilot flying to retrieve patients, then taking them to the capital

00:04:44.400 city. So regardless of the problem, you are usually at best three or four hours from help, but more often

00:04:51.820 than not up north, half a day to a day away from tertiary specialist care and some really, really sick

00:04:57.360 patients on a daily or weekly basis. So when you take something like childbirth, for example, where

00:05:02.500 there was at least some anticipation of when a person's going to need medical care, do those patients

00:05:08.200 just sort of come to Perth or is childbirth something that would be done locally? There's often a plan to

00:05:13.180 fly the patients to Perth. And also there's high rates of unexpected premature labor. So we spent a lot

00:05:18.340 of time actually on obstetrics, which terrified me. To be honest, I came from adult intensive care

00:05:23.460 medicine and learning obstetrics and pediatrics on the fly like that was sometimes a pretty nervous

00:05:29.200 situation. So if somebody suffers a motor vehicle accident or a heavy machinery accident in the field,

00:05:35.100 the first responders could take how many hours to get there? So first of all, when I started,

00:05:39.760 the first responders were often volunteer ambulance crews. So it might be the local teacher or the local

00:05:44.880 shopkeeper going out to do the first response. They can be easily three hours each way, drive back to

00:05:51.400 the nearest small hospital. And there's even parts of the state where we would land on the road on the

00:05:56.680 highway because it was the fastest way of retrieving the patient. Now that was pretty uncommon, but

00:06:01.040 typically patients have had a pretty good trial of life by the time we got to them. It was minimum

00:06:06.000 three to four hours after the insult. Wow. So there's just things we take for granted as far as,

00:06:11.460 I mean, do they have AEDs locally and things like that for people who are having heart attacks?

00:06:16.020 Yeah. So there's reasonable basic resuscitation equipment in these small nursing posts. A lot

00:06:21.900 of really nurse-led clinics around the place. And these nurses were unbelievable. You know, the stress

00:06:27.420 they must face on a daily basis, having to deal with whatever comes in the door.

00:06:31.980 Good resuscitation facilities were there, but it's a case of getting the patient to them and then the

00:06:36.100 appropriate medical skills to them as well. Now you're from the other coast. You're from the east

00:06:40.620 coast of Australia. You're from Brisbane. Yeah. Grew up in Brisbane and live more recently on the

00:06:44.800 Sunshine Coast, beautiful place called Noosa Heads. So what took you out to Perth? Did you train there?

00:06:49.760 I did not. The flying doctor job was something that had interested me. And in fact, the Western

00:06:54.920 Australian division had a lot more of this primary retrieval work, which was far more interesting than

00:07:00.220 routine shuttling of patients between regional hospitals, which is more the case on the east coast.

00:07:05.240 So it was really the nature of the work that attracted me to WA. And it's a beautiful part of the world.

00:07:10.100 And there's amazing remote desert and coastal scenery up there. And it was just a new adventure.

00:07:14.360 And something that I look back on is probably the most professionally satisfying part of my career

00:07:19.280 clinically so far. So what was the transition from that, which I think sounds like it came out of

00:07:26.520 critical care, big hospital critical care to that, to what you're doing today with HINSA,

00:07:32.060 which we'll talk about what, of course, what that is. Throughout my time working in hospital

00:07:36.600 intensive care and then in the flying doctors, I was essentially volunteering to work trackside doing

00:07:42.620 trauma and rescue for different motorsport events. So we worked at the Australian Grand Prix for

00:07:47.800 about 11 years in Melbourne. The Australian team did the Korean race when it was there for a couple of

00:07:52.460 years. And then I also did a lot of rally and off-road and that stuff was a lot of fun and very

00:07:58.240 interesting medicine-wise. You had long response times. You typically had two injured patients.

00:08:03.240 You had to do your own extrication and fire suppression. And the patients were generally more heavily

00:08:08.540 injured than in circuit racing. So that was the overlap in terms of career during that phase.

00:08:15.420 And then at the Australian Grand Prix, I met a guy called Adam Costanzo, who was Lewis Hamilton's

00:08:21.360 first physio. He was an Australian guy who'd been to university in my sister's year group. And so we got

00:08:26.420 talking one year and I met his boss and our founder, Dr. Aki HINSA, who we can discuss perhaps,

00:08:32.440 and kept in touch with them over subsequent years to the point where Aki was eventually looking to step

00:08:37.700 back from travel. And I was in the right place at the right time to take the role that we're in now.

00:08:41.940 And when was that?

00:08:42.920 2014 was my first year. So just coming up to the end of my sixth full season in Formula One.

00:08:47.980 Tell me a little bit about Aki and his philosophy of training.

00:08:51.020 So Dr. Aki HINSA was a Finnish trauma surgeon. He was actually doing humanitarian work in Ethiopia

00:08:57.540 in the mid-90s. And he was thinking about human well-being through a humanitarian sort of lens,

00:09:05.240 but met Halle Gabryselassi and those legendary Ethiopian Olympic runners during his time there

00:09:11.120 and translated some of those principles into the needs of an athlete. When he moved back to Finland,

00:09:17.440 Mika Hakkinen asked him to start to support him and his family trackside. And Mika won a couple of

00:09:22.640 world championships side by side with Aki in 98, 99. He became sort of the McLaren team doctor and

00:09:28.480 and then famously had long associations with Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Raikin and Sebastian and other

00:09:35.200 young drivers as they came through. And Aki unfortunately died a couple of years ago, but he

00:09:39.900 attained this guru-like status in the paddock. He was a really kind and inspirational figure,

00:09:45.120 a great doctor and a real father figure to many of the drivers that we see doing so well today.

00:09:50.780 And how did he overlap with Sid and the role that Sid played beginning probably in the 70s, right?

00:09:57.760 Yeah. So Professor Watkins was appointed and employed by the FIA, so the governing body of

00:10:03.840 the sport. Sid was doing all of the trackside rescue. He was in the medical car, which chases

00:10:08.680 the first lap of the race. And in those days, he was kind of the only doctor around through the 70s

00:10:14.660 and the 80s. And I guess as the 90s wore on, there was a little bit more of a trend towards teams having

00:10:19.880 some of their own doctors, which is what Aki was. So I don't think Sid overlapped directly with Aki.

00:10:25.440 There was a gentleman called Gary Hartstein who followed Sid and did a great job.

00:10:29.960 Sid retired what, in the late 90s?

00:10:32.080 That's correct. Yeah, it was the mid to late 90s. Yeah. And he was around at FIA conferences and

00:10:37.040 things for a number of years. I met him a couple of times, but a guy who really established trackside

00:10:42.120 medical care from nothing in the 1970s. And a number of drivers probably owe their lives and their health

00:10:47.760 to Sid and his successes. I was recently rereading Damon Hill's biography. And it's sort of interesting

00:10:54.900 to go back to even 25 years ago and think about how dangerous that sport was. And it went through

00:11:01.180 sort of these step functions of improvement and safety, sort of in the mid 70s, there was a big

00:11:06.420 step up. And then there wouldn't really be another huge step forward until the mid 90s after Senna's

00:11:12.060 death. And even just two years later, you see how in just a span of a couple of years, the sport got

00:11:16.300 considerably safer, which is something I'd love to dive into with you. So let's talk a little bit

00:11:21.240 about F1 because for many people listening to this, they probably don't understand so many dimensions

00:11:28.340 of it. Starting with the way I describe it to my friends who don't follow it, it's like having a

00:11:34.100 Super Bowl every two weeks. That's the only way I can explain it to people who don't pay attention

00:11:39.340 to Formula One, which not a lot of Americans do. Would you agree with that assessment?

00:11:43.480 Yeah, it's the world's most interesting and expensive circus, really. It's endlessly

00:11:47.780 fascinating on the social level and the human level. And I'm not sure if you saw there was a

00:11:51.720 Netflix series which came out based on last season's Formula One.

00:11:55.520 I've only watched each episode 14 times. So I have no idea what you're talking about. My family knows

00:12:00.420 every episode off by heart. And then actually, they keep calling for more and more. I heard there's

00:12:04.580 going to be another season.

00:12:05.600 They are filming this year as well. But you wouldn't be surprised to learn that

00:12:08.520 many of my friends and families and particularly female family members and friends, people who've

00:12:13.760 never had more than a passing interest in motorsport, have suddenly seen this series and

00:12:17.820 understood the human story that's unfolding all through the midfield and the teams and the

00:12:22.940 politics and the appreciation that you can have for not just the on-track action, but the human

00:12:28.900 stories that are going on behind the scenes is phenomenal. In terms of a comparison to Super Bowl,

00:12:33.920 I mean, it is a massive television event. It's outside of probably Summer Olympics and

00:12:38.480 Football World Cup. It's got, if not the largest TV audience of an annually recurring event. It's

00:12:44.240 certainly up there in the top three.

00:12:45.720 I mean, it's not uncommon for 200,000 people to 300,000 people to show up at every race throughout

00:12:51.200 the course of the weekend, correct?

00:12:52.560 Yeah, I think we had 360-odd thousand attendants over the three days in Mexico last week, for example.

00:12:58.400 Some races are better attended than others. The TV audience is there regardless. And we got new

00:13:04.060 owners of the sport a couple of years ago, so they're modernizing a lot of the approaches to

00:13:08.480 digital coverage as well, which is starting to get some traction.

00:13:11.920 And this year, there are 20 races?

00:13:15.740 21 races this year.

00:13:16.820 21 and next year, 22.

00:13:17.560 22 and possibly 23 or 24 the year after. So we're probably going to hit a ceiling there somewhere of

00:13:23.540 what the human beings involved in working the sport can take. There's a lot of discussion about

00:13:28.260 how the teams will approach, for example, a 24 race season, because there's a lot of travel.

00:13:33.760 It's a great life. It's a great privilege to work in Formula One, but it's very, very

00:13:37.220 hard on particularly mechanics, engineers, catering staff, people with families at home.

00:13:42.600 There's a limit to how much you can sustain being away. And the teams are going to be budget capped

00:13:48.660 in 2021 at the same time as they're going to have this interesting problem of perhaps rotating

00:13:53.940 staff. So there's never a dull moment. Things are changing all the time.

00:13:57.380 One of the things that first intrigued me when I really started to think about this through the

00:14:01.180 lens of human performance was the management of jet lag. Walk me through what a typical travel

00:14:07.000 schedule would look like, especially when they're on the one week pace, which is quite common.

00:14:12.240 Maybe just stepping back and thinking about the structure of the Formula One calendar. So we have

00:14:16.280 these 21 races and they're organized in absolutely no logical geographical order. The races pay to be 1.00

00:14:24.180 the first or the last race of the season. They pay to be on a traditional fixed date. They might be

00:14:30.020 aligned with a particular public holiday or a school holiday block. And that's always the priority over

00:14:34.640 any sort of travel planning logic. So we start the season with four races, which are long haul,

00:14:41.580 mostly in Australia and Asia. Going to be five races next year when the Vietnamese Grand Prix starts.

00:14:46.700 We then have a slightly nicer period sort of through the European summer where we are on the road,

00:14:52.840 working out of trucks in Europe, a little bit less flying. And then we're in this phase now,

00:14:57.980 which is the hardest part of the year. So seven or eight long haul flyaway races again,

00:15:03.300 back and forth to Asia a couple of times, Russia, three races in the Americas now, and then finishing

00:15:08.520 in the Middle East. And again, most personnel will go back to Europe in between each of those races.

00:15:13.880 So most people have done a dozen long haul intercontinental sectors over the last month

00:15:19.000 or so. And this is the time when championships are being won or lost. And it's in terms of sleep

00:15:23.520 management. I listened to your Q&A with Matthew Walker a couple of days ago, and there's an ideal

00:15:29.380 to sleep management, which we really try to adhere to as much as possible. But there's a really

00:15:34.360 pragmatic element to that as well. And particularly around the psychology of arriving at an event.

00:15:40.000 And this is not as much the drivers, but the crews, the mechanics and the engineers, people who

00:15:45.540 probably have a very narrow window to either get onto the new time zone or not. And if they get to

00:15:51.980 a point where there's been two or three nights of disrupted sleep, getting into the phase of the

00:15:56.220 week where the cars are on track, it can be actually quite a disturbing thing. So we try not to use sleep

00:16:01.920 aids, sleeping medications too much. But there is probably a case where athletes and others around

00:16:07.300 them need to perform for just having that one night reset with a sleeping pill on arrival in the new

00:16:12.400 location. As much as that's kind of the lesser of two evils, it can improve somebody's outlook and

00:16:19.820 mindset for the rest of the weekend to come. We do quite detailed sleep and jet lag planning for the

00:16:25.040 drivers and on occasion for the teams as well. But the reality of the schedule, the weekend schedule,

00:16:30.560 the flights that can be chosen, there's a limited number of flights to take a thousand people into each

00:16:35.220 destination with limited flexibility. So it's a case of being very pragmatic, not letting the perfect

00:16:41.080 be the enemy of the good and things just move so fast. You have to just keep getting through each

00:16:46.140 day the best way you can. I think a number of people watching Formula One casually might not

00:16:50.600 appreciate the magnitude of the team that supports the two drivers. So again, let's start at the top of

00:16:57.880 the food chain with the two biggest teams, Mercedes and Ferrari. 10 teams, 20 drivers, so two per team.

00:17:04.480 How big is the entirety of the Mercedes team or the Ferrari team?

00:17:09.380 So you're looking at probably between 900 and 1,000 people at the Mercedes Formula One factory,

00:17:16.400 for example. Ferrari would be very similar. And then again, in the Mercedes case, you've got another

00:17:22.040 six or 800 just building the engines in a separate facility, a separate company. So

00:17:26.860 probably looking at an average of 1,000 people per car up and down the 10 teams. And again,

00:17:32.240 that's going to be challenged soon when there's a budget cap. And there's going to have to be a lot

00:17:36.000 more rationalization and prioritization of how teams approach building the fastest car possible.

00:17:42.480 Will that budget cap apply? For example, you have some teams that aren't building their own engine.

00:17:47.140 Mercedes is building the engine and the other team is buying the engine from Mercedes.

00:17:51.140 Will that cap still apply the same to those teams? It seems a bit unfair.

00:17:55.760 So this hasn't been announced yet. I think the final regulations are due to drop any week now,

00:18:00.900 but these are precisely the topics that have been so controversial. A car manufacturer under a budget

00:18:06.460 cap faces a completely different scenario to one of the traditional privateer teams like Williams or

00:18:11.420 McLaren. So for precisely those reasons, it's not resolved yet. And I suspect the regulations will

00:18:16.600 continue to evolve over the next couple of years.

00:18:18.660 Now, of those people, how many are actually traveling to support the drivers and actually

00:18:25.420 be at the race versus stay in the factory?

00:18:27.500 So there's a core race team of about 43 people with a specific pass, which is all electronically

00:18:34.140 regulated in terms of the times they can be at the circuit. So those 43 people are operational.

00:18:38.780 They're allowed to touch the car and interact with the race event itself. At a typical large event like

00:18:44.780 Monaco or Austin, the traveling staff might be something around 150 per team where there's a

00:18:50.600 huge marketing and communications and media apparatus that goes along with the team's activities

00:18:56.300 for that week. There's a core bunch of engineers, of course, and the catering team and the truck

00:19:01.800 logistics guys, because they all are guys at the moment. And those teams are pretty constant,

00:19:07.180 but they'll vary. For example, a European versus a long haul flyaway race.

00:19:10.840 Yesterday, I was in the car with my daughter coming back from a cross country meet and we

00:19:16.180 were on the freeway and driving 75 miles an hour, which feels like nothing when you're just

00:19:21.680 driving in a straight line. And I said, Olivia, do you realize that those cars we watch every

00:19:26.660 Sunday can go three times this fast in a straight line? It was fast enough that she sort of got what

00:19:32.600 that felt like. And then I tried to explain to her the difference in G forces that we feel

00:19:38.760 when I would break really hard for her to feel a hard break or turn relatively quickly.

00:19:43.920 It's very hard, I think, for people who haven't been inside a race car to even try to extrapolate

00:19:49.580 what's happening in Formula One. I was actually trying to reflect as I was having this discussion

00:19:53.620 with her about the greatest G forces I've felt inside of race cars that I've been driving.

00:19:59.700 Nothing like what those guys experienced. You know, maybe 2G, 1.9, 2.1G. What type of forces

00:20:06.160 do drivers experience in F1 today? So we're between 5 and 6G on some of the fastest,

00:20:12.180 very high speed, constant radius corners like the final turn of Monza, for example, a couple

00:20:16.920 of the Suzuki turns as well. So it means your head, your 4 kilo head plus helmet is 4 or 5 or 6

00:20:24.120 times its normal weight and you've got to resist that with your neck muscles. So it's an extremely

00:20:29.000 physical activity. And I had a ride in, there's a two-seater F1 car, which is used at some corporate

00:20:35.160 events. I did some laps of Mexico as a passenger last year. And who got to drive?

00:20:39.120 Two of the ex-Minardi drivers with the greatest names ever in the history of Formula One. We had

00:20:43.640 Patrick Friesacker driving around and Zolt Baumgartner was also there helping out. So

00:20:48.620 I honestly couldn't have done five or six laps as a passenger. The forces and the experience was so

00:20:55.100 brutal. And our guys are, it's probably equivalent to doing a pretty intense CrossFit circuit for two

00:21:01.980 hours with a maximum of five or 10 second breaks around it while someone else is doing CrossFit

00:21:07.720 trying to push you out of the way of your equipment. And someone's in your ear asking you to solve

00:21:13.560 maths equations. And there's two or 300 million people watching and maybe you don't have a contract

00:21:18.440 for next year either that you're sort of thinking about at the back of your mind. So there's an

00:21:22.680 enormous amount going on while a driver has to hit that millimeter perfect apex every lap. And it all

00:21:28.220 just happens so fast. It's a lot more instinctive, I think, than people think, especially when the

00:21:32.460 drivers are in traffic, but very, very physical. Yeah. I think I'm probably more empathetic to the

00:21:40.280 mistakes that drivers make. What race was it when Seb came back on track without looking left,

00:21:45.800 Stroll almost hit him and then Stroll did the exact same thing 30 seconds later.

00:21:49.740 So the Italian Grand Prix a couple of months ago.

00:21:52.020 Yeah, that was, that was, that's right. It was Monzo. So I got to tell you, people were up in arms and,

00:21:56.740 oh, he should know better. He's a four-time world champion. My view is in the heat of the moment,

00:22:01.140 I don't even understand how people can be critical. I mean, I guess that's the nature of

00:22:04.640 what we do as spectators. And you can't see out.

00:22:07.480 No, that's the other thing. The cockpits are so high now.

00:22:10.560 Yeah. And you can turn your head only a couple of degrees in each direction. The mirrors give you a

00:22:15.760 little bit of view. The halo, which we'll discuss, does restrict a lot of vision as well. And

00:22:20.520 it's a difficult problem. The drivers can see sort of the top of their tires. They can't see most of

00:22:26.440 the extremities of the car. So those front wings hang out a long way and they're very susceptible

00:22:31.320 to damage. So it's almost unfathomable the way they can race in close quarters and literally

00:22:37.560 millimeter perfect sweeping the front wing of one car across and missing the tires of their

00:22:42.200 colleague and the other. So crazy.

00:22:43.800 It never gets old to me when I'm trying to show someone what type of precision and proprioception

00:22:50.940 is necessary. Because when we think of athletes having proprioception, I mean, that's one of the

00:22:54.860 hallmarks of all great athletes. They sort of always know where they are in space, but

00:22:59.900 driving takes it to another level because it's not just where you are in space. It's where

00:23:04.060 this car is in space. And I mean, because I'm biased, of course, watching Senna onboard laps

00:23:10.240 in Monaco. I mean, I could do that all day long because you realize he's coming within three

00:23:16.120 to six inches of curbs, of walls, lap after lap after lap at speeds that are sort of dizzying.

00:23:24.520 Yeah. Changing gears manually, no power steering. Yeah. Incredible footage, some of that stuff. But

00:23:29.200 you touch on an interesting point there, Peter. I think this proprioceptive aptitude is something

00:23:34.380 that really separates the great drivers from the good. And as someone who thinks about driver

00:23:39.360 performance, I haven't worked out how we could even study this, let alone modify it. But the way a

00:23:45.180 driver senses what's going on in the adhesion between their car and the track, the fine movements

00:23:51.920 of the car, they sense it sort of through their back, through their legs, through the contact that

00:23:56.480 they have with the seat. And I think the truly great drivers just have this unbelievable level of

00:24:01.380 truncal proprioception and sensory awareness that allows them to feel what the car is doing. And I

00:24:07.140 think perhaps if there's ever a way that we can measure and train that, it might lead to some step

00:24:11.920 forward in driver skills training. Well, that's a great point. I mean, I think anybody who's been

00:24:16.280 in a simulator will tell you that's true. I mean, I have a simulator at home and I know it's so much

00:24:22.820 harder to catch oversteer in the simulator because you don't have that feeling of oversteer that comes

00:24:30.040 before your visual change. Whereas understeer is all visual anyway. So you, the simulator seems great

00:24:36.640 for helping you correct that. But that to me just says exactly what you're saying, which is

00:24:42.060 when you deprive somebody of the ability to sense that in their trunk, in their butt, there's that 1.00

00:24:48.200 scene in Rush when the character playing Nicky Lauda talks about how he was gifted with a great ass. 0.99

00:24:55.500 And that's how he sort of knew that this tire was a little bit low in pressure. But I think that 0.98

00:25:00.660 stuff's all true. I mean, I just think that the great ones, they feel something. Now, of course,

00:25:05.400 the more interesting question is the one you pose, which was how would you train that? Most great

00:25:10.020 drivers come from a karting background. Off the top of your head, are any of the 20 guys on the grid

00:25:14.300 now not from a karting background? No, everybody would have started in karting. Yeah. They've taken

00:25:20.120 different paths through Formula 4, Formula 3 and different ways to the top, but everybody starts out

00:25:25.740 karting. Yeah. Karting is thought to be probably the best training that a Formula 1 driver can do.

00:25:31.100 There's very limited testing nowadays. So if a driver does want to train skills,

00:25:35.260 then karting is typically the go-to activity. Why do you think that is over, for example,

00:25:40.220 being in a simulator? Is it because you still get the feeling of the experience? You still

00:25:45.020 have to manage the slide and all those things? Yeah. It's a very raw experience. It probably

00:25:49.340 comes back to the very stripped out basics of feeling tire adhesion and car control and car movement

00:25:56.020 in a very accessible way. Going and running a Formula 1 car of any recent era on a track is not a

00:26:02.100 trivial exercise. It probably takes a team of at least 20 people just to get the thing fired up. 0.93

00:26:07.060 But karting is, yeah, a pure technical skills exercise that's still worthwhile doing.

00:26:12.800 I know. I sure enjoy it. Anytime I can take my daughter karting, I'm like, this is the greatest

00:26:17.420 thing in the world. There is no greater smile on your face than when you're sliding around on your

00:26:22.720 side on those things. So you alluded to the complexity of the cars today. Give people a sense of that.

00:26:27.860 You also talked a moment ago about how one of the, in addition to doing the CrossFit thing

00:26:32.260 and getting screamed at and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you've got an engineer talking to you.

00:26:36.740 When we're watching television, we hear a fraction of that discussion between the driver and his

00:26:42.880 engineer. How much is actually going on and what are the sorts of things that a driver is actually

00:26:47.660 being expected to manage? So there's a number of layers to that. On the team level, there's probably

00:26:52.680 10 or 20 different radio networks involving all of the key personnel. So from the team boss to the

00:26:59.080 strategist, to the chief engineer, to the individual driver engineers. There's also a huge infrastructure

00:27:05.280 back in the factory in the UK, and they might be looking at the radio messages from other vehicles.

00:27:12.280 They might be looking at all sorts of telemetry from the car. There's hundreds and hundreds of streams

00:27:16.940 of data, which sort of ultimately have to feed through this one person, which is the individual

00:27:21.280 driver's race engineer. So it can get pretty busy on the radios. And the art of being a race engineer

00:27:27.400 is probably being able to not only understand and manage your driver emotionally, but to filter that

00:27:33.880 information and deliver it in a way that's concise and useful. A related question, I guess, is what is

00:27:40.060 the driver doing around a lap? And there are limitations on what the car is allowed to do.

00:27:44.720 I mean, just for perspective, when I'm in a car and my coach is talking to me,

00:27:49.240 there are only certain parts of a circuit when I can even talk back. I have to be on a straightaway

00:27:55.240 to even just have the presence of mind to push the radio button and say, got it. Okay. We'll do.

00:28:04.020 Yep. Noted. Next lap. I'll hit that apex a little different. I can't do that when I'm cornering.

00:28:09.520 Yeah, for sure. And in the ideal world, there are structures to the radio talk that occur at a

00:28:14.460 certain point around the lap, but there are times when you don't have that luxury and

00:28:17.440 you reference sort of button pushing, but the modern Formula One steering wheel is an

00:28:23.320 unbelievable piece of complexity in its own right. I mean, these steering wheels are worth

00:28:27.320 50 or 60,000 pounds each. And there's probably 20 or 25 buttons on there, all of which have sub

00:28:35.680 menus and sometimes sub sub menus. And the drivers by regulation have to drive the car themselves.

00:28:41.780 They can only be given a limited amount of instruction from the pit wall as to what settings

00:28:46.260 to use. And it's got to the point now where they're more or less changing the settings of

00:28:50.680 the car between each corner so that it's optimized for each particular corner. So the really great

00:28:56.600 drivers not only have this proprioceptive feel, they've got a bandwidth excess where they can

00:29:02.620 really tune into the car. They can make all these changes fairly automatically around a lap.

00:29:08.220 They have just the experience and the knowledge to understand how the car is going to work.

00:29:13.020 And then on top of that, they have enough cognitive capacity left over to sort of sit above the race 0.93

00:29:18.680 to understand what their competitors are doing, what is the context of their pit stop strategy and

00:29:25.000 when they need to push, when they need to conserve tires. So it's really an incredible cognitive load.

00:29:30.140 And that's a big part of what we are managing with our coaching staff across a race weekend.

00:29:34.340 Give me an example of some of the complexities that can be managed corner to corner by the driver.

00:29:40.060 Things like brake bias, diff settings, and then these modern engines are absolutely incredible

00:29:46.560 hybrid pieces of art. They're hybrid electric engines.

00:29:49.700 Tell folks what that means. So we had the last reg change. So these came in in 2014?

00:29:54.960 2015.

00:29:55.540 Okay.

00:29:55.880 Yeah.

00:29:56.480 So prior to that, we were talking a pure naturally aspirated, was it a V10?

00:30:00.800 1.6 liter V6, yeah. The V10s were the good old days, some time ago now. But these are electric

00:30:07.200 hybrid engines. So they have a couple of different methods of energy recovery. There's braking energy

00:30:13.020 recovered from the vehicle. There's heat energy from the turbocharger. And these are fed back

00:30:18.340 through a battery to all bend. Probably about a quarter or a third of the engine's power comes

00:30:23.120 from this recovered electrical energy. But to reference your previous question, so deploying that energy

00:30:28.460 in the most appropriate way around a lap is an enormous part of driving a current F1 car and

00:30:34.000 saving energy for a period where you might be trying to defend from an overtake, but deploying it in the

00:30:39.080 parts of the lap where it's going to give you the maximum benefit in terms of lap time is just a

00:30:44.220 massive engineering puzzle in itself, which the drivers have to keep on top of.

00:30:48.520 So the engines themselves, I mean, this is incredible. The internal combustion engine was

00:30:53.140 invented, what, in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And for the entire history of the engine to 2014,

00:31:00.160 the thermal efficiency went from maybe 20, 25% to 28 or 30% at the very best scenario. But since

00:31:09.100 2015, Formula One has taken that efficiency from about 28, 29% to over 50% now. So just a massive quantum

00:31:18.540 leap in the way engines work. And for all of its faults in terms of carbon footprint, flying this great

00:31:24.620 circus around the world and racing cars, when you multiply that kind of engine technology by 80 million

00:31:30.900 new cars sold around the world each year, you can see that there is a case to be made that Formula One does

00:31:36.080 a lot of good as well in developing these technologies. I think it does good on two main

00:31:40.840 fronts, that being one of them, and of course, auto safety being another one. Let's go back a little

00:31:46.480 bit to the efficiency. How long do you think it takes for those types of benefits to trickle in?

00:31:51.860 Certainly, it trickles to the very high-end halo supercars quite quickly within a couple of years. But

00:31:57.720 I think if you look at some of the technology that's coming into your average medium family sedan,

00:32:03.540 nowadays, it's probably reasonable to say within 10 or 15 years, a meaningful amount of this stuff

00:32:09.180 becomes relatively standard. And I guess it depends on regulatory pressures in different jurisdictions

00:32:14.160 around the world. But the technology is there if governments mandate the use of it, I suppose.

00:32:19.320 And we'll see, I guess, where we are on this planet over the next decade or so. We're going to see a lot

00:32:23.980 more emphasis on these technologies. I want to come back to safety in a moment, but I can't help but

00:32:28.960 ask a question that actually, I mean, I've thought about in the past, but I still don't really

00:32:32.340 understand. All of the complexity you've discussed, it's mind-boggling. I know that if I spent the rest

00:32:38.360 of my life, I could never drive one of those cars. I could do goofy sedan laps, but I could never do a

00:32:44.180 real lap, let alone a race with anyone else out there. We might have trouble just driving it out

00:32:48.500 of the garage. I mean, they're not easy. And yet, the drivers are getting younger and younger.

00:32:54.380 Sometimes, again, I'm sitting there, we always watch the races together every Sunday. And

00:32:57.960 because we're in California, we actually like watching them in real time. So we do get up at

00:33:01.980 five to watch them first thing in the morning or whatever. And I'm trying to explain to my daughter

00:33:06.120 in particular, because she's old enough, how old Norris is and LeClaire and even Verstappen.

00:33:12.260 I'm like, these guys are really young. And there was a day when a 30-year-old was in his prime. A 30-year-old

00:33:22.340 is not in his prime in this sport anymore. And certainly, by the time you're... A 30-year-old

00:33:27.480 couldn't break into the sport, put it that way. Whereas Damon Hill was 30 in effectively his rookie

00:33:32.660 year, 29 perhaps. But how is it that these drivers are getting younger and younger as the complexity of

00:33:39.180 these cars is getting greater and greater? I'm just blown away by it.

00:33:42.500 I think there's a couple of dimensions to that. One of them is purely cultural. I think people just

00:33:49.020 didn't think you could be a Formula One driver at all before the age of 23 or 24 previously.

00:33:54.760 I think maybe some of that complexity plays into a gaming culture. A lot of our younger drivers do

00:34:01.180 a lot of gaming. And it's kind of a bit of a cliche to make the comparison. But I think there probably

00:34:06.600 is an element to that. But I think now that it's been done, we had Max Verstappen come into the sport

00:34:12.060 just out of his 16th year, I think. And we've had a couple of teenage drivers since then,

00:34:17.020 Lance Stroll, Esteban Ocon and others. I think now that it's accepted that it's possible,

00:34:22.860 the teams are more open to looking at younger talent. I think the pathway to Formula One

00:34:28.660 previously, let's think about the 90s or the early 2000s when we did have these brutal V10 engines and

00:34:35.220 the cars were physically very much harder to drive. I think there was a physicality about that that

00:34:40.240 probably suited a slightly older driver as well. The cars are not easy to drive nowadays by any means,

00:34:46.600 but they are probably less of that brutal, raw, explosive, muscular power required for

00:34:52.160 perhaps an individual more well-developed physically.

00:34:55.860 And it remains to be seen, of course. But does this mean that Formula One drivers will have longer

00:34:59.800 careers today coming in earlier and staying longer? Or does it mean that the turnover is going to be

00:35:06.080 higher? And it's sort of interesting when you consider, like, I always think of Lewis as really

00:35:10.900 young. I don't know, 2007 seems like it was sort of yesterday. And yet Lewis is, what, 34?

00:35:17.120 Yeah, Lewis and Sebastian are both 33, 32, 33 now.

00:35:20.820 Which would make them two of the oldest guys in the grid, right?

00:35:23.080 Yeah, we had Kimi turned 40 last week, but he's a bit of an outlier.

00:35:26.100 I think there's an opposing sort of trend, though. The seat time is so valuable now. There's so little

00:35:34.360 testing. It's relatively difficult to get a super license, which is the qualification. You need to

00:35:39.340 collect points in other series. You need to do well in other series just to get to Formula One.

00:35:44.600 And then on top of that, the cars are just so complicated to drive that there's a huge premium

00:35:49.180 placed on anyone with seat time and seat experience. So I think that will trend very strongly towards

00:35:54.840 longer careers. So people will come in earlier and they'll be retained for longer. You'll have to

00:35:59.900 have a much stronger case to bring an unproven rookie into the sport.

00:36:03.600 Let's take a step back a little bit and kind of talk about some of these changes that have really

00:36:08.200 taken over. You've alluded to the Halo. Explain what the Halo is, when it came about, and what the

00:36:12.720 effect of that has been. So the Halo is a cage-like device which sort of sits over the top of the

00:36:18.620 driver's cockpit. So just going back to basics, we're talking about open cockpit racing here, and that's

00:36:23.980 one of the classic characteristics of a formula car. It's got open wheels and an open cockpit,

00:36:29.620 and traditionally you could see the driver. The Halo is this device which has been constructed over

00:36:34.960 the top to protect the head of the driver, which was the one last remaining big vulnerability in

00:36:40.240 terms of safety. And the Halo's been in for two seasons now. I must admit, personally, I was a little

00:36:47.560 skeptical. I could understand the rationale for it. I did wonder whether it was a solution in search of

00:36:54.160 a problem. Having said that, we've had probably at least four distinct incidents now in Formula One

00:36:59.880 and Formula Two where the Halo has prevented a significant impact with a driver's head. So

00:37:04.840 regardless of what anyone thinks of it now, it's here to stay. The current Halo is not a pretty thing.

00:37:11.220 It's definitely probably in its first iteration at present, and it will be developed. I think in

00:37:16.680 IndyCar this year, they're using an evolution of the Halo, which has more of a jet fighter screen

00:37:22.360 around it, which is much, much more aesthetically pleasing. And I think-

00:37:26.080 Instead of that bar down the middle? 0.85

00:37:27.420 Correct. And I think when things like fogging and airflow have to account for all weather conditions

00:37:33.360 and all visibility conditions, and when those problems can be solved, probably we'll move towards

00:37:37.960 aero screen with an opening out the top so that it's still technically open wheel racing. And it's

00:37:43.300 a pretty impressive piece of kit. I mean, it's seven kilos of titanium. The test the Halo apparatus has

00:37:50.400 to pass by FIA regulation is something like a 10 to 12 ton load, a large bus being sat on the top of

00:37:59.300 this seven kilo device and not deforming at all. Just again, another example.

00:38:04.000 That's unbelievable.

00:38:04.560 Remarkable technologies that go into these beautiful works about these cars that we

00:38:08.920 can sometimes take for granted.

00:38:10.780 And there's another thing that we wear in a car called a Hans, which it's been around almost

00:38:16.560 exactly 20 years now. It's been in Formula One a little bit less than that, maybe 15 years.

00:38:21.940 You've indirectly alluded to it by explaining why the driver can't turn his or her head. Well,

00:38:27.460 in Formula One, his head, I guess, but left to right. What is the Hans doing and how is it 0.51

00:38:31.940 saving a life? So the Hans is a head and neck support device. Hans is actually one of several

00:38:38.460 brands that are on the market, but it's the one used most commonly in open wheel series. It's a

00:38:44.120 carbon fiber device that sits on the top of the shoulders of the driver. It has the race harness,

00:38:50.120 the seatbelt straps over the top of the device, pressing it down into the driver's shoulders. And then

00:38:55.480 the helmet is attached by some very high tensile straps to this device. The effect of that is that

00:39:01.500 if the driver has a head on or a rotational impact, the movement of the head, especially the flexion of

00:39:07.940 the neck is greatly limited. And the Hans device has no doubt across many categories of motorsport

00:39:14.660 saved many, many drivers from high cervical fractures. So fractures of the neck that would

00:39:19.860 have killed them or severely disabled them for their life. It's interesting. We probably only have

00:39:25.480 anecdote about this and don't get me wrong. I think that the Hans and other devices like it have

00:39:31.440 been an innovation in motorsport that shouldn't be questioned at all. But the forced transmission

00:39:36.880 down the spine is interesting to think about. And I think if you look at a lot of the accidents we

00:39:41.960 get in rally nowadays, and also in close quick racing, we seem to get these thoracic and lumber

00:39:47.060 crush factors a lot more commonly. And I don't think this has been formally studied, but it seems

00:39:51.860 like the Hans probably changes the loading on the spine and produces something that's transmitted

00:39:56.740 more axially down to other parts of the spine. Do you think that's something that they experience

00:40:01.800 when they hit a bump or is it more when there's a head-on collision? It would be more in a very high

00:40:07.680 speed impact where the loadings on a driver and an impact like that vary with the exact circumstances.

00:40:13.080 I mean, it totally makes sense because if there's a vector that's going forward

00:40:17.520 and that normally would have been distributed between C1 and C3, and now you've locked that

00:40:23.840 up with the Hans, well, then you're going to see that presumably below about T1. The force has to go

00:40:29.820 somewhere. I think the thoracic spine is braced somewhat by rib structures and the drivers in their

00:40:36.140 cars are in a highly recumbent position. They're almost lying flat on their backs, which a lot of people

00:40:41.960 don't appreciate. And that also adds to the unbelievable skill required to just control

00:40:46.520 one of these vehicles. The fact that you're more or less lying flat on your back with limited

00:40:50.160 visibility. So that changes the force distribution as well. I was in Italy last year and I got the

00:40:56.080 chance for my wife to see a Formula One car and get inside one. And she's like, what, five, seven or 0.99

00:41:00.500 something like that. And I'm like, okay, so a Formula One driver might be a total of an inch taller than

00:41:05.600 you, two inches taller than you. Get in there and now try to imagine doing what they're doing from

00:41:11.340 that position. And she couldn't believe how little she could see from being in this position. It was

00:41:17.120 just, it is overwhelming. The modern F1 car is very long and very wide and very heavy as well. And

00:41:23.760 controlling those cars with limited visibility in traffic is a very underappreciated part of the art.

00:41:30.040 I think it's the hardest. I mean, there's nothing I've ever dabbled in that I could extrapolate to and

00:41:37.660 say that's harder. I just don't think anything is. People say, oh, you've swum from here to here or

00:41:42.520 something. And I'm like, that is a trivial, trivial task. That is simply a matter of just putting your

00:41:49.320 head down and trying harder. That doesn't speak to what you're describing here. It's a sport with many

00:41:55.260 complex layers and a lot of that social complexity too. Yeah. How do you manage, I mean, is that part of

00:42:01.980 your job description or is that just something that based on your own personality, you're obviously

00:42:07.620 very thoughtful, you're very introspective that you've sort of gravitated to, which is you have

00:42:12.480 the luxury of not being, you have the luxury of being sort of there to serve everyone, but you have

00:42:18.900 huge personalities. You have a sport with only 20 athletes, but 10 owners and they all have to be

00:42:24.160 under one roof effectively 21 times a year. Yeah. First of all, I guess with reference to our

00:42:31.460 position, we're extremely privileged to be working across multiple teams. How many teams do you work

00:42:36.420 with of the 10? We work with at least one driver in every team at present. So about 14 drivers in

00:42:41.920 some form are under our care. I never take that for granted. It's an enormous privilege and it goes back

00:42:48.260 to Aki's time really when the model we use is medically led and the medical services that we provide,

00:42:55.420 I think are kind of the glue that cement those relationships. And I would say, so our model is that

00:43:01.440 we have a performance coach who people would refer to as the trainer or the physio who accompanies

00:43:05.880 each driver. This coach will attend all of the races and normally train with the driver in between

00:43:11.960 races as well all year. So they have a very close one-on-one relationship. We tend to use mostly

00:43:16.820 sports scientists in our team. They have a good broad understanding of the physical preparation,

00:43:23.360 the nutrition, the sleep management, and the other things that we need to think about across the

00:43:28.500 race season. We do use some physiotherapy staff as well. And increasingly dual qualified

00:43:33.980 sports scientists, physios are probably the ideal for this job. But all of that specific preparation

00:43:40.120 aside, probably the most important role for our coaches is management of the cognitive bandwidth of

00:43:45.800 the driver across a race weekend. So we discussed driving the car and the drivers will have about

00:43:51.080 seven hours in the vehicle across a race weekend. But on top of that, there's probably 10 hours of

00:43:57.020 engineering meetings in which they get very, very deep in the data and the analysis of what's

00:44:01.560 happened on track. And then endless other hours of media and marketing commitments, as well as just

00:44:06.840 all managing the politics of any athlete's career. So as you referenced, you might think about the

00:44:13.020 NBL or the NBA, sorry, or the NFL, where most weeks you're going to have two team bosses under one

00:44:19.180 roof at any one time. But in Formula One, every two weeks, you have 100% of the competitors in the

00:44:25.940 world, all 20 seats, they're all there. You've got all the team principals, you've got a good

00:44:30.580 percentage of the team owners, you've also got the principal regulators of the sport and the owners

00:44:35.760 and promoters. And all of those people are mingling freely with the media, you know, there's nowhere to

00:44:40.980 hide in a Formula One paddock. It's a, it's a big traveling family. So that does add a certain level of

00:44:47.960 political, I wouldn't say tension, that's probably pejorative or negative, but it does add a real

00:44:55.020 social complexity to what these athletes need to get out and do, which is ultimately drive the car.

00:45:00.800 And our coaches get to know their drivers, they manage a lot of their key relationships,

00:45:05.280 they manage the time of their driver, they will usually develop a role where they can sort of

00:45:10.680 interface between the marketing team and the media commitments and things and certainly recognize

00:45:15.800 when their driver needs to be left alone, where they may need a holiday, when they can push,

00:45:21.520 when they can train, when they can do more or less. So that's probably, and these drivers are all

00:45:27.020 human beings. People think of professional sport and especially Formula One as a place where everything

00:45:34.040 is done with an unlimited budget to absolute perfection. And I think Peter, you probably have

00:45:40.900 contact with enough professional athletes in various categories to understand that it's just not

00:45:46.320 like that, is it? Regardless of the funding, regardless of the techniques and the science and

00:45:50.620 the innovation available, professional sport is just about human beings and all their flaws and faults.

00:45:56.720 Well, yeah, I probably don't have nearly as much experience as you, but I think what's most

00:46:00.500 interesting to me is that even the people who are the best, most of them still have the same sorts of

00:46:04.880 doubts that quote unquote normal person would experience. And you see it across seasons where people get

00:46:10.900 bumps and you get a bad bounce. You get things that just don't go your way for a period of time.

00:46:16.220 And all of a sudden it sort of shakes your confidence. And I don't know. I mean, I think

00:46:19.780 in a sport like Formula One, I would have to guess that the toll of that is really great.

00:46:26.640 There is nowhere to hide. It's like tennis. There's no ambiguity about who's driving that car or who's

00:46:32.680 on that side of the tennis court or that side of the tennis court. And yes, there are plenty of

00:46:36.400 examples when a driver is doing everything right and the car fails. Certainly Seb a couple of weeks

00:46:41.880 ago, best line of the whole Formula One season, by the way, bring back the bleep in F12s, V12s or

00:46:48.900 other. I just have, like I said earlier, I think I just have great empathy for the load that they

00:46:54.400 must be under. And yeah, you can say, well, look, come on, they're athletes. They're doing something

00:46:58.040 really fun and it's really great. But I often wonder if it's as fun as we think it is compared to,

00:47:03.600 you know, I'm always reminded of Senna at the very end of the documentary talking about how

00:47:09.460 you got the sense that Formula One just wasn't as fun to him at that point in his life because

00:47:13.400 he was hearkening back to his days of karting. He just kept saying like, there was no politics,

00:47:18.340 there was no money. It was just about the pure joy of racing. And I do wonder when you talk about

00:47:25.140 some of those obligations that these guys have in the political games that they have to play and

00:47:29.480 just the unhappiness. You referenced the younger drivers coming through. Yeah, there's a lot of

00:47:34.540 satisfaction to be derived, of course, from working with world champions and winning championships. But

00:47:38.920 actually, one of the joys of my job as well is bringing these young kids through and we typically

00:47:43.620 start working with them in F3 or F2. Can you explain to folks the difference between F1, F2,

00:47:48.780 F3? And what does that look like? I mean, we're going to come back and talk about

00:47:51.740 the recent events of F2, but help people understand what those different formula mean.

00:47:56.020 So this has been greatly simplified in the last couple of years to the credit of the FIA. There's

00:48:01.040 a more or less straight pathway through F4, F3, F2, and then F1 nowadays. Formula 2 occurs at F1 race

00:48:09.820 weekends. So the drivers in F2 are very much on the radar of the Formula 1 teams and bosses.

00:48:15.860 They're a car which is maybe five to 10 seconds a lap slower than an F1 car, a lot simpler in terms of

00:48:22.460 the controls. They're not these remarkable hybrid sort of engines. They've got some similarities,

00:48:27.640 probably the most important element being the tires. So tire management is incredibly important

00:48:32.260 in Formula 1. And the drivers in F2 and to a lesser extent F3 have to learn that art in those

00:48:39.240 categories. F3 cars are a little bit simpler again, sort of no power steering, a lot more physical,

00:48:45.340 a lot more brutal to drive, but slower.

00:48:47.080 And typically how old are the folks in F3 and F2?

00:48:51.460 You're probably talking an age range of 16 to early 20s. These guys and girls are playing for

00:48:59.380 keeps. Every year could be the end of their driving career. So I commend anyone who has a bit of time

00:49:04.780 to watch the F2 racing. It's genuinely exciting week in, week out. And it's a big job for the stewards

00:49:10.320 to keep on top of driving standards because, you know, so much is at stake in those categories.

00:49:14.280 And then F4 is more or less the graduation point from carts to open wheel racing and

00:49:18.880 national F4 championships in many different countries that sort of feed through to the

00:49:23.260 higher categories. So the cars get a little faster and a little more complex as you go each step up

00:49:27.460 the chain.

00:49:28.220 What's the role of money as one goes up the chain? When you look at a sport like basketball,

00:49:34.740 you referred to the NBA a moment ago. If you're good, if you live in the United States and you are

00:49:41.680 really good, you can make it to the NBA. You don't need any money. Usually that'll take you

00:49:48.380 through a college scholarship through to the NBA. But if you're exceptional enough, you could even go

00:49:53.400 straight from high school into the pros. Same is true in baseball. Again, you almost always go

00:49:58.660 through the minor leagues. Very rare you'd go straight from high school into the major leagues,

00:50:02.200 but you could go through college. You could go from high school into minor league baseball,

00:50:05.500 et cetera. But Formula One is not quite like that, which doesn't mean you have to come from wealth,

00:50:10.300 but you certainly have to get the endorsement of someone with a lot of money. Where does that

00:50:16.480 begin in the chain? So you take a really promising kid in a go-kart. How do they get to Formula Four,

00:50:23.240 Three, Two, and One?

00:50:24.440 So first of all, I guess, karting as a hobby. And karting starts at the age of six or seven or eight

00:50:30.620 years old. So it's not like strapping on running shoes or football boots. You have to have a parent

00:50:36.880 with a little bit of budget and a little bit of interest in motorsport, even to start karting.

00:50:42.160 Typically, motorsport can run within families. So often there's a father, usually there's a father

00:50:47.200 who's competed and who has the funding to bring a young competitor through. And then I guess,

00:50:53.940 as you get good at motor racing, there's two streams. There's those who continue to pay their

00:51:00.060 way and roll the dice and take their chances and hope that their day will come. And there's others

00:51:05.740 who are really an obvious, outrageous, natural talent who will get picked up by one of the three

00:51:10.980 or four big teams and inducted into a junior driver program. So those opportunities are relatively scarce,

00:51:18.340 but if you're really good, you'll probably find yourself aligned with one of the big teams.

00:51:22.740 And are those geographically relevant? Are you more likely to get one of those streams if you're coming

00:51:28.020 out of Europe than if you're coming out of South America? I think Europe is absolutely the 0.91

00:51:33.220 geographical center of the sport. It's very difficult to succeed from Asia or from any of

00:51:39.080 the Americas without ultimately ending up in three or F2 in Europe, because that's simply where the

00:51:45.540 racing is conducted under the noses of the F1 teams. And that's where those top levels of category

00:51:50.520 actually unfold. So yeah, there's 20 seats in Formula One, unlike tennis or golf or football,

00:51:56.660 where there's 100 or 200 or more competitors at the very highest level. These drivers are competing

00:52:02.940 for an extraordinarily small number of positions. And everybody who's there, regardless of how

00:52:08.340 they've been funded, is there on some kind of merit. They've had to win championships or do well in

00:52:13.740 junior categories just to get the super license points to be eligible to drive in F1. So I would posit

00:52:19.520 that the depth that we see in the field currently is by far the best it's ever been. And it's getting

00:52:24.740 better every year and really adds to the stories all down through the midfield where some of the

00:52:29.420 most interesting action unfolds. It's not just about the Mercedes cars or the Red Bull cars in

00:52:34.900 recent years dominating at the front of the field. There's all sorts of fun to be had.

00:52:39.380 I think that's actually, and I heard that this year for Netflix, both Ferrari and Mercedes are being

00:52:44.340 filmed. Is that true?

00:52:45.860 So the Netflix series has focused on the midfield where a lot of these stories are. Mercedes have

00:52:50.800 agreed to some limited involvement this year. And I'm not sure actually what Ferrari is doing,

00:52:55.380 but I think they probably will feature to a limited extent.

00:52:58.180 That'll be great because I'd love to see it. But I actually think last year worked out really well,

00:53:02.460 not having them in the story because you could have just talked about Ferrari and Mercedes the whole

00:53:07.360 time. But to talk about everybody but them made it incredibly interesting.

00:53:12.540 I agree. It was one of the really powerful outcomes of the series. And it's actually one of the hazards of

00:53:17.140 work in the paddock at the moment. Trying to avoid the camera?

00:53:20.400 Well, I spend a lot of time talking to drivers about their health or their medical issues or

00:53:25.500 the troubles that they're having in their career. And it can be very easy to be having a private

00:53:29.740 conversation in a corner somewhere and suddenly find a Netflix boom microphone over your head or

00:53:34.400 a camera for a distance. So to be fair, the team are relatively sensitive to that sort of thing.

00:53:40.260 And it's probably not just Netflix. I mean, we are performing our work in front of cameras day in,

00:53:45.600 day out, the entire year. And it's just something you've got to be a little bit mindful of.

00:53:49.900 How would you handicap the safety of Formula One today? To put it in perspective,

00:53:55.120 in the 1960s and in the 1970s, there was a very good chance that if you did this for a living,

00:54:01.520 you were not going to retire. In fact, it's kind of amazing the exceptions to that rule because

00:54:06.840 they're the ones that we tend to know about today. Most people, unless you're sort of a diehard

00:54:11.780 fan, you've forgotten the names of all the people that died. I think Jochen Rant is the only one to

00:54:17.660 have won a Formula One title posthumously. So by definition, if you're rattling off the names of

00:54:23.240 Formula One champs, they usually at least lived long enough to win. And many of them went on to die

00:54:28.560 prematurely in retirement. But the list of people that most people wouldn't remember, like the Peter

00:54:33.920 Revsons of the world. And I mean, everybody remembers Jill Villeneuve, who never won a title, 1.00

00:54:38.180 but would still be considered one of the greats of all time. But there's this belief that Formula

00:54:42.300 One today is so insanely safe to as not be interesting. But one, do you think that that's

00:54:49.580 true? And two, can we learn anything about the recent fatality in Formula Two that can give us a

00:54:55.200 sense that no, actually, it's still a very dangerous sport? It's a really delicate argument,

00:54:59.180 because I think if we're honest with ourselves, the danger, there has to be a small element of

00:55:05.160 danger, at least to provide that depth of interest in what the drivers are doing. It has to be hard,

00:55:10.780 it has to be something that has to be something that we can't do. Yeah, exactly. So Formula One

00:55:16.720 is extremely safe. And we referenced all of the terrible things that happened in the 70s and early

00:55:21.380 80s. But there's a number of strands that track design is getting much better, the car design has

00:55:26.820 come on in leaps and bounds. And the trackside intervention, the medical and rescue services are

00:55:31.740 also light years ahead of what they used to be. But we have had three or four notable fatalities

00:55:37.420 over the last two decades. And so there is always some part of the Swiss cheese that lines up some

00:55:44.100 unaccounted for possibility that can still result in a death. And one of the big vulnerabilities is

00:55:50.080 a side on impact with a stationary vehicle. And unfortunately, we had a terrible accident about six or

00:55:55.520 eight weeks ago, the Belgian Grand Prix in Formula Two, where a car who'd had a relatively innocuous

00:56:01.800 spin, Antoine Hubert, was stranded side on stationary in the middle of the track and was just

00:56:07.980 hit at well over 200 kilometres an hour, 170 miles per hour by one of his fellow competitors who was

00:56:14.980 just unsighted. So we had this nose to side impact, which as good as the F2 and the F1 cars are,

00:56:21.820 and believe me, they're very, very good. The intrusion properties of the chassis, the tub are

00:56:26.420 exceptional, but there are some forces that you just can't account for in every situation.

00:56:31.660 Yeah. I'll never forget the press conference a couple of days after Senna died when Max Mosley,

00:56:37.320 then very new in his post as president, said, and I thought he was so spot on by the way, he said,

00:56:43.840 the question isn't why did Senna crash? Because that's all anybody wanted to talk about.

00:56:49.560 To this day, there's still great debate about why he crashed. So the question is, why did he die?

00:56:56.320 And he said something I'm paraphrasing, and he said it much more eloquently.

00:57:00.180 You are at the highest level of the sport at the absolute limit of mechanical and human capability.

00:57:07.620 There are going to be crashes all the time, but nobody should die in one of these crashes.

00:57:14.080 I don't know if the statistics bear this out, but it certainly seems like they do just watching

00:57:20.220 races. It doesn't seem like there are any fewer crashes today, but there's no denying that the

00:57:25.900 fatalities are an epsilon fraction of what they used to be.

00:57:30.840 And let's be honest, the crashes are a massive part of the appeal of motorsport,

00:57:34.840 especially to the more casual fan. It's spectacular when a vehicle crashes and there's

00:57:39.280 parts flying everywhere, and it adds to the drama and the human tension as well. So that will always

00:57:45.720 be part of the sport. But as you reference, it needs to be made as safe as possible. And

00:57:49.580 you talked about the Senna footage driving around Monaco, and one of the remarkable insights there is

00:57:55.460 how high the drivers are sitting up out of the car. And after Ayrton died, that was one of the big

00:58:00.600 innovations. So the head and the shoulders of the driver were much better protected. There's a shroud

00:58:05.760 around the head and the helmet, which limits any sort of intrusion, and the cockpit sides are much

00:58:10.920 higher nowadays. Senna's death probably had a greater impact on the safety of F1 than any single

00:58:18.120 tragedy in the history of this sport. When Jim Clark died, it's not like the sport changed that much.

00:58:24.200 And Jim Clark was to Formula One in the 60s, almost. I mean, no one was quite to F1 what Senna was, but

00:58:29.760 comparable, certainly.

00:58:31.200 There was an enormous amount of low-hanging fruit in terms of safety during that time. So a lot of

00:58:35.680 the simple things were done.

00:58:37.340 Yeah, yeah. I mean, but they still drove unmarshalled. They still did. I mean, I guess

00:58:40.960 to this day, I don't think anybody knows what actually happened to Clark's car.

00:58:44.900 Yeah. Senna's death was the first in a generation, really. There had not been a death apart from

00:58:50.280 Roland Ratzenberger the previous day. There had not been a death for 14 years. And so it was a bit of a

00:58:55.180 shock. And so there was another step change in safety, for sure.

00:58:58.100 The wheel tethers, all sorts of things. You recall, it wasn't even 10 years ago when Mark

00:59:03.000 Weber had that unbelievable crash. You know, the one I'm talking about?

00:59:07.640 In Valencia.

00:59:07.980 Yeah. And to see the wheels not coming off was sort of unbelievable.

00:59:13.400 Yeah. And he-

00:59:14.240 Walked away.

00:59:15.000 Went back and did his TV interviews. Yeah. It's very hard to injure yourself in a Formula One car.

00:59:19.480 I had a look at this in a couple of years ago now, but just the accident patterns in Formula One. And

00:59:24.360 it was interesting. I defined a medical incident as any time a driver was reviewed and assessed at the

00:59:31.360 track medical center, either because they had an injury or because they had a mandatory attendance.

00:59:37.000 And what force is a mandatory attendance?

00:59:39.120 It's come down a little bit in recent years, but it's 15G on the car now. So there's an impact light

00:59:43.960 which comes on in the car so that the trackside marshals or the medical crew can tell if the

00:59:48.900 impact has exceeded this amount, then they automatically are assessed at the trackside

00:59:53.400 medical center. It was actually quite revealing to look at these incidents over a couple of years

00:59:58.700 because it was a little bit counterintuitive, to be honest. So more than two thirds of the

01:00:04.120 incidents happened on the Sunday, on the race day, and 90% were in dry weather. So this is medical

01:00:10.000 incidents.

01:00:10.500 What fraction of those were in the first lap?

01:00:12.840 I'd say most were in the early laps, but you do definitely get mid to late race safety cars as

01:00:19.020 well, where a car can go off at high speed by itself. So the bigger impacts were on Sunday in

01:00:24.660 the race. They were in the dry when drivers are perhaps self-evidently pushing and they're doing

01:00:29.740 their highest speeds in close quarters with other cars. But there were five rollover accidents,

01:00:34.200 I think, during the time that I looked at, only one of which resulted in injury. That was

01:00:38.280 Fernando's massive crash in Melbourne a couple of years ago. The impacts that happened in the wet,

01:00:43.460 they're often very spectacular. There's lots of parts flying off the car, but they tended to be

01:00:47.720 sort of low to medium impact. And the real high risk for injury was a 40 G plus impact in dry weather.

01:00:55.220 Can you even put that in context for me for what a normal person would experience on a freeway?

01:00:59.500 We don't have the sensors, I know, but can we even estimate?

01:01:02.760 The impact on a car, it's a very crude measurement actually, because it's measured sort of on the

01:01:07.280 chassis. It doesn't really correlate that much with what the forces are on the driver.

01:01:12.300 And of course, the direction of the impact influences the vector of that measure.

01:01:16.160 And where is it picked up on the chassis? Because if it's before the chassis collapses,

01:01:20.520 then obviously a much lesser fraction of that would hit the driver, hopefully.

01:01:24.760 That's a very good question to which I do not know the answer. So the drivers also have this

01:01:28.860 in-ear accelerometer. They have a three-axis accelerometer in their earpiece,

01:01:33.360 and that's interrogated later. So there's a much more accurate data analysis which comes

01:01:38.240 after an accident by the FIA. But usually that information in comes not going to benefit the

01:01:44.800 treatment or the management of the driver on any given day. That's going to be a lesson for the

01:01:48.600 future. And that reflects, of course, the forces on the skull much more closely because it's actually

01:01:53.320 sitting in the middle ear. The driver can sustain very, very high peak G forces if they're instantaneous

01:01:59.960 or very, very rapid in terms of a spike of force. The lower forces, if they're sustained over a

01:02:08.020 longer period, and we're talking sort of tenths of seconds rather than thousandths of seconds,

01:02:12.200 those are the impacts that can do a little bit more damage.

01:02:15.000 That's interesting. And of course, if you come down to seconds, holding 5G for two seconds on part

01:02:20.740 of an arc is... Yeah, that's not going to injure you, but it's...

01:02:23.520 It's not going to injure you, but boy, that's next level. People don't get, I suppose, how

01:02:28.280 tired drivers are after the race. I mean, I've got to see some drivers after races and they look as

01:02:35.720 exhausted as someone who's, as you said, done two hours of a brutal CrossFit workout. And even

01:02:42.200 walking up a flight of stairs looks like it's asking them a lot. The cars took a step change in

01:02:48.160 speed and power and grip. It was the beginning of 2017, so they became much more physical to drive

01:02:54.220 at that point. By and large, an experienced F1 driver will cope with most scenarios. They'll be

01:03:00.140 tired, but they're well within their physical capabilities. How much weight will a driver lose

01:03:04.400 during one of the hotter races? I guess Singapore is the archetypal physical race. It's a race which 0.99

01:03:10.580 always goes for the full two hours. It's a city street race. It's got more corners than any other

01:03:15.780 circuit, 24, 25 corners, and it's all 90 degree turns at moderate speed. So in tropical heat and

01:03:23.780 humidity, the drivers there will often lose three or four kilos in weight. They have in the car a

01:03:29.240 drinks bottle. If their engineer is being very kind to them, that might be 1.2 to 1.5 litres for a race

01:03:36.280 like Singapore. Usually it's about half a litre, but it's hot. It's like drinking tea after a few

01:03:41.380 minutes in the car. So the driver error at the end of the Singapore Grand Prix is quite something to

01:03:46.580 behold. It's drivers coming in flushed and exhausted and a faraway look in their eyes. And

01:03:52.260 that's a race where recovery is particularly important. Now, there was a rule change a few

01:03:58.800 years ago with respect to drivers' weight. What was that? Yeah, the drivers have always had a pressure

01:04:04.780 on them from the engineering teams to maintain their weight at the minimum possible. And I guess you're

01:04:10.720 trying hard and spending millions of dollars in some cases to shave hundreds of grams off the car.

01:04:16.520 So losing a kilo off the driver is a relatively easy thing for the teams to ask with a favorable

01:04:22.680 cost benefit analysis. My favorite example of this was back when I used to be a sort of pathetic 0.98

01:04:28.900 cyclist. I remember once going into the bike shop to get some new bottle cages and they had like the

01:04:34.980 regular cages were this much. And then the super duper fancy carbon fiber cages that were 19 grams

01:04:41.220 lighter were 10 times more. And the guy at the bike shop was trying to talk me into getting them. And I

01:04:47.360 was like, look, dude, before I go and drop an extra couple hundred bucks to save 19 grams, I've got about

01:04:54.140 two kilos I could afford to shed. I think I'll save my money for now. Yeah, fair, cool. So we were at the

01:05:01.920 point where we had these younger drivers, these teenage drivers coming in, a number of whom were

01:05:05.960 quite tall. We had some of the older drivers like Mark Webber who were in a continuous battle to save

01:05:12.000 weight. And honestly, we were starting to see some unhealthy... What was the minimum weight set at?

01:05:17.140 So minimum weight was car and driver combined. So at that time, there was no reference to the

01:05:22.140 driver's weight. It was just lose as much as possible. We had people running into problems with

01:05:26.220 overtraining, undernutrition. We had some eating behaviors coming out, which I was not comfortable with.

01:05:30.920 And we had Charlie Whiting, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year, was the great technical

01:05:36.120 leader of the sport for the last few decades. And to Charlie's credit and to the FIA's credit, I raised

01:05:40.940 this issue with them and they acted very quickly. So we have a new regulation this year where 80 kilos

01:05:45.820 is the mark. That's the driver plus their helmet, their race suit and their seat. And any driver who's below

01:05:51.960 that level is ballasted up to 80 kilos. So it basically takes the driver weight out of the equation to a

01:05:57.960 large degree. And I must say the drivers are absolutely delighted with this. They've just

01:06:02.580 got the luxury of being a kilo or a kilo and a half heavier. They can put on a little bit more muscle.

01:06:07.620 Their nutrition's just not quite the chore, the daily misery that it used to be. And I think we're

01:06:12.060 in a much better place for that regulation. Now, we've had women get very close to F1. 1.00

01:06:18.400 I think there's even been women that have competed in races, but not for a complete season. Is that

01:06:23.020 correct? Yeah, there've been two or three women who competed and one scored half a point, I think,

01:06:28.800 in the 1970s when half points were awarded from time to time. So it's been a pretty rare thing. We've

01:06:34.680 had Susie Wolfe drive in free practice on a Formula One weekend as recently as a couple of years ago,

01:06:40.780 but it's been a long time since a female driver has raced in a Sunday race.

01:06:45.180 Are there any females in the F2, F3 pipeline? 0.96

01:06:49.140 Not obviously at the moment, no, but we have this year seen the advent of an all women's racing

01:06:55.800 series in Europe called W Series. And we've been closely involved in that. And I must say,

01:07:00.640 it's been really a huge success on many levels and a wonderful experiment. And I look forward to

01:07:06.300 seeing that develop over the next decade or so, because it's a really vexed question,

01:07:12.120 gender and motorsport. I think there's a perception that driving an F1 car is like

01:07:17.300 being a fighter pilot, for example, where I think intuitively men and women should be relatively

01:07:21.740 equal. It's a fine motor and a cognitive skill. But the truth is that as we've discussed, Formula

01:07:27.360 One is an extremely physical activity and it's not so much F1. I think F1 maybe does play to the

01:07:33.860 strengths of women in some ways, some of the social complexity, some of the spatial stuff, 0.93

01:07:38.640 the power steering. I think a woman absolutely can succeed in F1. But the problem comes at the

01:07:43.760 grassroots levels of motorsport where we, A, have a very small pipeline of competitors coming through

01:07:49.260 and B, the environment in F3, for example, is pretty hostile. The cars are more physical to

01:07:54.280 drive and they're up against, frankly, teenage males with differences in risk-taking behavior,

01:08:00.180 testosterone levels. There's both physical and-

01:08:02.460 Right. So the lack of prefrontal cortex in these male drivers is actually a competitive advantage to

01:08:08.700 them at that stage in driving, probably. Again, I mean, there is academic literature of this kind

01:08:15.000 of stuff in Olympic sports, for example. There is some evidence for the physical and cognitive

01:08:20.520 differences between male and female athletes. But I think basically to find a woman who can succeed in

01:08:26.580 F1, they are absolutely out there, but they'll probably be an outlier. And by definition, then you

01:08:32.000 have to be bringing more women through the pipeline to find those outliers. And W Series is a great first 0.92

01:08:37.980 step, in my opinion, towards just providing another avenue for women to get to the top levels of 1.00

01:08:43.080 motorsport. And certainly there are cultural things that need to change as well. I mean,

01:08:46.860 fathers who are funding motorsport careers undoubtedly favor sons at the moment, but hopefully that will

01:08:52.440 change as well. W Series has proven to be a great TV success. The TV ratings have been great. The depth

01:08:59.360 of the driving talent has been, I think it's exceeded all expectations. The racing's been really good to

01:09:04.620 watch. And they'll go to an expanded calendar next year and probably in the future, more powerful

01:09:11.460 cars as the series becomes established. For perspective, what are the, if you go through

01:09:17.460 the W Series, the Formula 3, 2, and 1, what are the relative horsepowers of each of those cars?

01:09:23.540 Ooh, I don't have that off the top of my head.

01:09:25.700 Well, a Formula 1 car today is less than 1,000 horsepower, correct?

01:09:28.960 Yeah. The electrical power makes them very talky as well. So it's not just a top line power.

01:09:34.420 Yeah. The acceleration is staggering.

01:09:36.180 Yeah.

01:09:36.600 It's kind of amazing in the 80s, you look at the MP44, which is 1988. I mean, that was a 1,200 horsepower

01:09:43.540 car.

01:09:44.420 Yeah. A beast. Absolute beast.

01:09:47.480 With no downforce.

01:09:48.460 And a manual gearbox.

01:09:49.680 Yeah.

01:09:49.820 Yeah. And back then they had much more power available to them at qualifying. They would

01:09:54.320 detune the car for the race.

01:09:56.040 And they would use the engine once for an hour and then throw it away, right? So the engine

01:09:59.640 was there to be blown up essentially at the maximum speed possible.

01:10:03.460 It is crazy.

01:10:04.420 This is the other, I guess, environmental dimension to current Formula 1. The reliability

01:10:10.080 of these engines is unbelievable. They have three engines to do the entire season with.

01:10:14.500 Yeah. Explain to people what a team has at their disposal. How many tires, how many gearboxes,

01:10:21.860 how many engines, what are they trying to manage over the course of these 21 races?

01:10:27.360 This is all part of the chess game, part of the really interesting strategy. So you have,

01:10:31.780 as I referenced, three engines across and the engine comes in different parts. There's the

01:10:36.780 heat recovery system, the kinetic recovery system, the battery. So you can replace some of

01:10:41.900 those parts individually without some penalty, but basically you've got to do your Friday practices.

01:10:47.300 You've got to do your Saturday qualifying and a third of the races on one engine. And I mean,

01:10:52.720 that again is an extraordinary step forward from where we were even 2010, 2011. So principally a

01:10:58.780 cost cutting measure, but something that absolutely will flow through to the reliability of road

01:11:03.360 cars. Tyres, there's 12 sets of tires for the weekend. And again, you have to select well in

01:11:10.620 advance eight or 12 weeks ahead of the race. What tires are you going to take to that event?

01:11:14.580 There's three compounds to choose from. So the different compounds are either faster,

01:11:19.860 don't last very long or a little bit slower in terms of lap time, but they'll get you through a

01:11:24.400 much bigger chunk of the race. And the engineers and the strategists need to work out what tires 0.96

01:11:29.020 they're going to bring to a race weekend and then how they deploy them in each session,

01:11:32.360 which ones you're going to use to practice, which ones you're going to qualify on,

01:11:35.040 and then leave yourself with enough options for the race.

01:11:37.300 Let's talk about the 2021 rule changes. How many of those have been solidified?

01:11:42.700 I think they're getting closer to the final document. There were some meetings, I think,

01:11:47.500 last week in Geneva between the regulators and the various team bosses and other stakeholders.

01:11:53.080 I think we have a bit of an understanding of the fact that the car is going to have some

01:11:57.540 simplified aerodynamic characteristics. The engines probably will stick to something very

01:12:03.720 similar to the current formula. And then the budget cap will probably more apply to the

01:12:08.980 teams and the operations and what they can do in terms of the number of upgrades, the number of

01:12:13.620 different parts, the level of activity that they can bring to upgrading the car through the season.

01:12:18.420 What kind of changes will take place with the tires?

01:12:20.420 The tires, there's going to be quite a big change. So we're going from 13-inch wheels to 18-inch wheels.

01:12:25.520 So the tire will be a lot smaller in profile, which is, it may not sound very significant,

01:12:31.060 but actually the tire currently is relatively old school, big balloony piece of rubber that

01:12:36.680 is a big part of the car's suspension at the moment. And bringing in an 18-inch wheel with a very

01:12:43.400 much narrower tire sidewall is going to change everything in terms of suspension and braking and

01:12:49.540 aerodynamics over the cars. So that's a huge challenge for the engineers they're working on,

01:12:54.100 even as we speak. What got you interested in motorsport in the first place?

01:12:57.680 In 1985, the Australian Grand Prix returned to the international Formula One calendar. And so

01:13:03.960 for whatever random reason, I happened to watch the Australian Grand Prix this weekend in October in

01:13:09.660 1985. And the TV coverage was done with a huge amount of enthusiasm. This was a big international

01:13:15.340 event coming to Australia. And I just caught the bug. I haven't missed a race in the 34 years since.

01:13:20.700 So it's been an incredible ride. You were a triathlete, right?

01:13:23.660 Did a little triathlon. I have to say, not a lot of training in the current schedule,

01:13:28.020 but did my first race in 1988 and struggled through a couple of Ironmans. Yes. Learned a

01:13:32.740 lot about being an athlete, actually, even by being a hopeless weekend warrior.

01:13:37.140 Yeah. What did you learn from that that translated to what you're doing today?

01:13:40.240 I think you have a basic understanding of what it's like to train. I think what it's like to get

01:13:45.820 up in the morning and have to do a training session that might be a bit of a chore on that

01:13:50.080 particular day. I think you have a fundamental understanding of the difference between aerobic

01:13:55.700 and aerobic training. Some of those really simple things. I mean, as we referenced, I come from an

01:13:59.860 intensive care, critical care background. So I rely very heavily on my coaches and my coaching

01:14:05.640 director, Pete McKnight, to implement the technicalities of coaching for our drivers.

01:14:10.020 This is not my strength or forte. But I think just having been an amateur athlete gives you a little

01:14:14.540 bit of appreciation for what it's like to have to stick to a training program and then compete,

01:14:19.680 even on whatever level. A race day is a race day, right? No matter what the stakes are.

01:14:24.520 Yeah. It's interesting, right? I mean, it's sort of like you can take your own race as seriously as

01:14:28.920 it's being taken on the world's biggest stage.

01:14:30.820 Yeah. And I look back now and Ironman in particular, so badly. There are so many things I would do in

01:14:36.140 terms of nutrition, in terms of sleep, in terms of structure of training now. I'm looking forward at

01:14:41.680 some point in the next decade to having a second triathlon career and implementing a lot of the

01:14:46.200 things I've learned from my fantastic coaches in recent times. It seems that the drivers today are

01:14:51.840 much more tuned into nutrition and exercise than drivers of 25 years ago. Again, Senna, I keep

01:14:58.900 referencing him, was kind of the outlier. I mean, the seriousness with which he took his fitness,

01:15:05.140 with which he took his training, was the stuff of legends. That was not the norm. I mean,

01:15:10.500 you look back and you watch James Hunt, amazing driver, not training.

01:15:15.600 It's interesting that you mentioned James. I think probably Niki Lauda was the first and Niki

01:15:20.160 in recovering from his horrendous injuries at Nürburgring in 1976 was maybe the first example

01:15:26.180 of somebody who really implemented a serious physical training regimen. But certainly Senna was

01:15:31.080 a big standout in his time. And then Michael Schumacher perhaps built on that into the current era.

01:15:36.560 But yeah, the benchmark keeps rising. And most of the drivers, even if they're not particularly

01:15:41.900 interested in the absolute peak of physical preparation, they have a pretty reasonable

01:15:46.320 understanding of what a strength workout is and what their aerobic capacity needs to be to get

01:15:51.080 through a two-hour race.

01:15:52.800 So I didn't know this about you until somewhat recently, but you survived cancer and it was

01:15:57.620 quite advanced.

01:15:58.440 I sort of don't think of that time as any sort of great survival threat. Like in F1 season,

01:16:05.480 it all happened so fast, it all moved so quickly. But 10 years ago, just last month actually,

01:16:10.780 I was working in the north of Australia with the flying doctors in a very remote area and

01:16:14.840 I had developed testicular cancer, which I diagnosed by myself on one of the very early portable

01:16:21.260 ultrasound machines we had up there. As you know, it's a cancer. If you had to choose a cancer

01:16:26.060 to have, it's the one with the best survival prospects, you know, in excess of 90%. So

01:16:31.220 whilst it was, you know, it was real chemotherapy and real surgery.

01:16:35.080 You did not have seminomatous cancer, correct?

01:16:37.540 Yeah. So it was non-seminoma and I actually did have pulmonary metastases as well. And

01:16:41.940 looking back now, it was a relatively rough ride. I had some thrombotic complications as well. Had a

01:16:47.100 pretty profound paraneoplastic thrombophilia.

01:16:49.980 Can you explain to folks what that means?

01:16:51.700 So in some cancers, in some people, you'll develop a clotting tendency. And in retrospect,

01:16:57.320 the first day I went in for a scan, I had an IV drip put in and a sort of a little clot formed

01:17:03.320 all the way up my arm. That should have been a bit of a warning sign, but you then have a

01:17:06.360 permanent catheter implanted to receive the chemotherapy drugs, a portocath. And that sits

01:17:11.960 in the large vein next to the heart and mind, in fact, clotted up completely. So there's something

01:17:16.720 called superior vena cava syndrome, which every medical student sees in the textbooks. And

01:17:21.200 I had never seen really in real life. And I woke up one morning, looked in the mirror and

01:17:26.180 yeah, I had basically a complete blockage of blood returned to the heart from the upper part

01:17:30.520 of my body. But it was an interesting lesson in the realities of being a patient. I think I had

01:17:36.940 always been a relatively empathetic doctor, but just the logistics of having to go to appointments,

01:17:41.960 having to be stabbed with needles multiple times a week, the fatigue of the drugs, having to find a

01:17:47.460 car parking space at the hospital every day. I think it just gives you a great appreciation for

01:17:51.560 the experience of being ill and being a patient. And I had access to really good private care. I had

01:17:58.020 access to virtually my handpicked specialists in the different fields that I utilize. But even then

01:18:03.820 things go wrong. You're still subject to the same vagaries of nursing and nursing shifts and

01:18:09.200 blood collectors and adverse reactions to drugs. No matter who you are, we're all still human,

01:18:13.660 right? Was there any point during your illness when it wasn't a given that you were going to

01:18:18.640 survive even getting through all the chemo? So not to get too deep into the weeds, but I did have

01:18:23.680 these lung lesions, which... Yeah, I mean, that stage four non-seminomatous

01:18:28.380 testicular cancer is not a walk in the park or a given that you're going to survive.

01:18:33.200 Lance Armstrong also had stage four non-seminomatous testicular cancer. His odds were

01:18:39.180 50-50 at the time of his diagnosis. I mean, mine were a lot better than that. I think closer to

01:18:44.160 80 or 90 percent, but it's still a non-significant, non-trivial chance of death, I suppose. But I'd

01:18:49.580 traveled in Africa a lot. I'd had a couple of screening chest x-rays in the past, an occupational

01:18:55.220 screening x-ray and then another one when we... Just part of your TB screening? We'd actually had an

01:19:00.060 intensive care patient who turned out unexpectedly to have a diagnosis of TB. So the staff in the unit had

01:19:05.580 been screened. So I'd had two little lesions on my lungs, which were known from previous x-rays,

01:19:11.240 whether it was an old granuloma from somewhere in Africa or whether it was... I think one of them

01:19:16.060 was probably an intrapulmonary lymph node. So there were these lesions and they were on the scan and

01:19:20.660 nobody sort of really knew if that was significant. But lo and behold, they actually disappeared with

01:19:25.260 the chemotherapy. So it was really only at the end of the process that it was absolutely understood

01:19:30.440 to have been a stage four tumor. So I didn't get to necessarily live through all the anxiety of that.

01:19:37.080 And it was only in retrospect that the understanding was there. Perhaps the prognosis wasn't as good as

01:19:43.160 we had thought all along. So how much time are you on the road each year now? I had about 40 nights in

01:19:48.680 my own bed in Switzerland last year. You don't live in Australia anymore? No, I'm a Swiss resident at

01:19:53.980 present. I do get to spend about seven or eight weeks per year at home in Australia. So we have a race 0.52

01:19:59.520 in Melbourne. So get a little bit of time before and after that event. And then around some of the

01:20:04.440 Asian races, I try to sneak home for a week. It's always very refreshing to see friends and family

01:20:09.500 and have a surf as well. So how do you manage this toll of the schedule on you? I mean, it's your job

01:20:16.720 is to take care of everybody else and manage the toll. But what do you do to manage it in yourself and

01:20:21.620 your team? I mean, you have a very large team, of course, of people like Pete and Tommy. And then,

01:20:26.140 of course, all of these trainers that are working directly with the drivers. I mean,

01:20:29.620 how do you manage yourself and that team? Managing a business, as you probably know,

01:20:34.020 as a clinician is not necessarily something that comes naturally. So it's pretty demanding. And

01:20:38.720 honestly, if it wasn't a sport that I had a great passion for, I wouldn't do this. If I was invited to

01:20:44.360 a similar job in football or basketball or something else, I probably wouldn't do it. It's passion for the

01:20:49.300 sport and living in the middle of the history that you're making appreciation from

01:20:53.560 of where the sport has come from that makes it work. I think it's been really difficult to do

01:20:59.940 any sort of structured formal physical training. I have tried to pay a lot of attention to sleep.

01:21:06.640 It's very difficult at this time of year in terms of the travel schedule, but I really try and

01:21:10.980 prioritize seven or eight hours sleep wherever we do, wherever we go. And nutrition, I suppose,

01:21:16.680 I've used a lot of time-restricted eating in recent years. As you saw last year, when you visited

01:21:21.620 us in the paddock, we're presented with an abundance of really palatable, excellent food

01:21:27.580 and team buffets. And it's remarkable to the extent to which you can eat quite healthy if

01:21:33.540 you choose to, but there's certainly some desserts there which are hard to pass up. And I think time

01:21:37.680 restricted eating and a little bit of fasting, not to the extent of long and fast, like you've

01:21:43.900 famously experimented with yourself, Peter, but that stuff can be really powerful. And just trying to

01:21:48.580 get outdoors, get in the sunlight, it might be only every three or four weeks that you get to get

01:21:53.100 outdoors three or four days in a row, but just try and get on the bike, try and paddle, try and do

01:21:57.140 something and also move throughout the day. I'm lucky that in the F1 paddock, we are on our feet and

01:22:02.600 getting our 10,000 steps almost in the course of a routine workday. So that helps.

01:22:07.480 So basically you've got to be a little more careful with respect to your sleep and your exercise than

01:22:12.680 your default environment would allow you to be. You could very easily sort of fall off a cliff doing this.

01:22:18.160 Yeah, it could be an extremely unhealthy job. And part of our work is managing the team members

01:22:24.500 through their same experiences. We have two or three of the teams with an embedded coach or

01:22:29.080 physiotherapist. And so we try to pass on this kind of insight, these healthy habits to the teams as

01:22:34.880 well. And many of the traveling team members are very invested in this. Others are less interested,

01:22:39.980 but I think it has an impact for sure. What have you not yet brought to this sport that you think

01:22:45.380 you're capable of bringing through your team? So Formula One is perceived as being the pinnacle

01:22:53.240 of excellence in every area, certainly in motorsport. And in terms of the engineering and the development

01:22:59.200 of the car, that's absolutely true, probably operationally as well. On the human side, honestly,

01:23:04.920 there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit. And we've spent a number of years, Pete and myself,

01:23:09.580 just honestly getting basic systems in place. Our coaches have a fair bit of latitude and freedom

01:23:14.900 to work within their individual skills. And very importantly, they work within the individual

01:23:19.920 skills and strengths and weaknesses and attention spans of their own driver. So making our system

01:23:26.960 a system though has been priority. So it's just getting everybody doing some basic fundamentals of

01:23:32.620 monitoring, working to a schedule of assessments across the year. So that job is done now. And I

01:23:38.380 think we're looking to start to innovate. And I think, again, in any sport, there are literally

01:23:44.260 hundreds of scientifically proven interventions that you can make for an athlete. But the art of what we

01:23:49.820 do is fitting that into the lifestyle and the travel schedule. And again, the attention span and

01:23:55.360 interest level of the athlete that's in front of you. So I think there are things that we can do in

01:23:59.760 terms of cognitive skills, perhaps eye training, perhaps proprioception. I don't know what those

01:24:05.200 things are yet, but I'd like to study them in a little more detail. There's an incredible lack of

01:24:10.120 physiological monitoring of any driver in the car even now. And perhaps we can talk about that a

01:24:15.060 little bit in a moment. But the other interface probably is bringing together the way that an

01:24:20.600 engineer manages their driver across a race weekend with the coaching that we are doing. And we've

01:24:26.240 started over the last year to really try to get the engineers to work more closely with the

01:24:31.660 performance coaches and likewise to give our performance coaches a bit more engineering knowledge

01:24:36.900 and understanding of what the overlays of a good lap time looks like, what it means to brake later,

01:24:41.980 to steer differently, and try to get those two streams of information coming to the driver to talk to

01:24:46.940 each other and integrate a lot more.

01:24:48.260 Why is there such a dearth of physiologic information going back to the paddock? I mean,

01:24:56.580 when you sit in one of these garages and look at the information that's coming in about the car,

01:25:04.020 it makes the information that the mission control was getting from the moon landing,

01:25:10.800 there is more information coming in about tire pressure than the entire Apollo 11 rocket going to the

01:25:17.360 moon. And yet you don't know their heart rate. You don't know their heart rate variability. You don't

01:25:21.760 know their electrolytes. You don't know fluid status. There are so many things about the actual

01:25:27.020 driver you don't know. In fact, do you know anything about the driver in real time?

01:25:31.320 In the car, very little. And there's a few historical reasons for that. One is a simple

01:25:36.460 matter of the regulations. So there's race suits and the fireproof underwear that the drivers are

01:25:42.260 wearing are heavily, heavily regulated. So right down to the stitching on the sponsor labels,

01:25:47.420 there's actual standards for that kind of stuff. And it has to be tested and homologated.

01:25:52.060 So there's a safety issue there.

01:25:53.460 Yeah, there's been a real limitation of what you can attach to a driver in terms of physiological

01:25:57.460 monitoring. On top of that, the teams will not add any weight to the car. So even 100 grams of

01:26:03.780 some kind of measuring or monitoring device in the vehicle would not be acceptable. And then whilst

01:26:08.940 what we do is absolutely incredibly valued in terms of promoting human performance, it's often a bit

01:26:16.080 of a low priority compared to the time pressure that's involved in just getting a car out on the

01:26:21.320 track and getting it developed. The bandwidth for any sort of human innovation has traditionally been

01:26:26.540 relatively narrow. The FIA also mandate that any sort of monitoring on the driver has to be

01:26:33.680 purely for a safety purpose. So at present, there's not a lot of interest from the governing body in

01:26:40.800 terms of performance or physiological measurement for understandable reasons.

01:26:44.800 But wouldn't those translate to safety? For example, we don't really have a sense of how often

01:26:49.660 accidents are taking place because of fatigue that is physiologically predictable.

01:26:55.520 Yeah, indeed. I think we're a long way from measuring that probably. But this last two years,

01:26:59.760 we've had a biometric sensor glove introduced for the driver. So they have essentially heart rate and

01:27:05.600 oxygen saturations measured in the driving glove. And the defined purpose of that is so that the

01:27:10.600 trackside intervention services can see what the driver is physiologically doing after an impact

01:27:17.200 whilst they are on their way to the scene. So that's a first step. And I suspect we'll be a little

01:27:22.740 more liberal in the future. There's going to be some pressure from television and digital streaming as well

01:27:27.940 to measure physiological parameters of the driver in the car as well, which I must say is not an idea

01:27:34.540 that has received such a warm reception from the drivers themselves. It's a potential competitive

01:27:39.600 advantage and information advantage that they're giving away to their competitors. But I think we'll

01:27:44.620 see more of this. We're looking at a couple of devices now, which will probably be compatible with

01:27:48.720 the regulations. And we'll have a couple of projects potentially next year where we're measuring in

01:27:52.980 the car a lot more. How long does it take a driver to learn a new circuit? So this race in Vietnam next

01:27:58.800 year, how long does a driver have to prepare to learn that in a simulator? It's probably less than

01:28:04.720 you think. The good drivers will get out there within half a dozen laps and they should be pretty

01:28:09.220 close to on the pace. You know, they'll take another 10th or two off across a race weekend as they get

01:28:14.420 better. But the sim is a very important part. They'll prepare for each circuit specifically with a

01:28:21.120 simulator session. But it's not the same as being out there sitting in the seat and feeling the

01:28:25.880 forces. So as they go from this weekend, let's just say when we're done with this race on Sunday 0.90

01:28:31.440 night, two weeks from now, they'll be in Brazil. So that's a long enough stretch that many of them,

01:28:37.080 I assume, will go home. Everyone will go home for sure. Yeah. When do they start getting in the

01:28:41.560 simulator and driving Interlagos before they get down there? So simulators are a limited resource.

01:28:47.180 And depending on the infrastructure of the team, you know, there will be junior drivers,

01:28:51.720 there'll be test drivers, there'll be others who need to use the sim. So probably somewhere next

01:28:55.900 Wednesday or Thursday, most of the race drivers will have their day or their half day in the

01:29:00.500 simulator. They are learning the circuit for sure, but actually a big part of their job on that day

01:29:04.320 is evaluating other aero parts and other upgrades to the car. So it's not just there for the luxury of

01:29:10.500 the driver learning the circuit. Is it expected that the driver learns the circuit in the off

01:29:14.900 season? At the European circuits, they will have driven most of the circuits many times in the

01:29:19.840 junior categories. It's in these long haul flyaway races where a rookie driver will be encountering

01:29:25.080 the circuits for the first time. And honestly, they'll have a lot of engineering briefings across

01:29:29.120 the weekend to help familiarization, but they'll get into the swing of the circuit within a handful

01:29:33.900 of laps and then build on that across the race weekend. By Sunday, they should have a very limited

01:29:39.120 disadvantage to people who've been there before.

01:29:41.140 It's still amazing to me when I think about how long it takes me to learn circuits.

01:29:45.680 You've got to remember, I guess each circuit is different from year to year. The adjustments

01:29:48.960 that are being made to the car from corner to corner will change with the characteristics of

01:29:53.780 the car from year to year. So even people who've been there before are kind of relearning how to drive

01:29:58.960 the circuit in this year's car to achieve the optimal lap time.

01:30:04.300 It's unbelievable. I don't know that I'll ever be able to successfully communicate to

01:30:08.680 my friends, to my family, to listeners of this podcast who, if anyone's not a fan of Formula One

01:30:14.760 and they're still listening at this point, that would be kind of a minor miracle, I guess. But

01:30:18.140 this has been a great discussion because I think it has probably been the most complete discussion

01:30:23.860 I've brought to the podcast of this sport, why I think it's so special and what's involved in it.

01:30:29.020 I think that this sort of physical, emotional, and cognitive piece, I don't think we've talked

01:30:34.080 much about the emotional. I think we've talked about the physical for sure. The cognitive overload

01:30:38.640 is staggering. I don't consider myself one who lacks in cognition, but I could never manage the

01:30:45.260 cognitive load that these guys manage. But then there's this other piece, which is the emotional

01:30:49.360 piece, which is it's not a sport where getting pissed off does you much good.

01:30:55.360 Emotional control in the car is incredibly important. And it's in the car, it's in front of

01:31:00.800 the media, because you can easily with an errant comment, create an enormous amount of stress

01:31:05.920 next week at the next race, let alone contract renegotiations and fighting for one of those

01:31:11.740 precious 20 seats. Yeah. And as we referenced, we're dealing now with teenagers in many cases

01:31:18.140 and teenage drivers are just like other teenagers. We may have an enormous amount of wisdom to impart,

01:31:24.280 but there's a point where a young person perhaps doesn't even have enough life experience to

01:31:30.680 understand the lesson that they're being given. And it's gratifying, obviously, to see a driver

01:31:37.260 develop through the junior categories. And then some point in their early 20s, the pennies start

01:31:41.460 to drop and the pieces start to come together. And they just have gathered enough experience to

01:31:45.800 understand how all the strands of their behavior and their approaches to things and the motives and

01:31:52.240 the layers of social complexity around them all come together and can be coordinated in a way

01:31:57.720 that's to their advantage. So yeah. And they have relationships, they have family relationships,

01:32:03.360 they may gel well with their race engineer, there may be other team members that they have to manage

01:32:09.140 more judiciously. So all of this stuff is going on all the time. And it's a privilege to be there,

01:32:14.300 sort of helping and guiding in some way, making a small contribution to not only growing competitive

01:32:19.320 race drivers, but good human beings in this crazy sport that we live in.

01:32:23.180 Do you think 2021 will sort of reshuffle the order of the teams a bit?

01:32:27.780 There's reason to think that the midfield teams might have their day more often, we may get more

01:32:34.320 variability occasionally in the results. But whenever there's a large regulation change,

01:32:39.040 the teams with the most resources are the ones who will exploit that to the best of their abilities.

01:32:44.020 And you do risk the top teams getting further ahead for a period of time.

01:32:48.320 Although with the last reg change, we did see a big swap between Red Bull and Mercedes.

01:32:53.180 Indeed. So Mercedes, to their credit, were well ahead of their competitors on the engine

01:32:58.220 development. Red Bull and Ferrari were busy fighting for championships through 2013, 2014. And

01:33:03.480 Mercedes had put a lot more resource into the new engine regulations and probably stole the march on

01:33:08.940 everybody by a year or more. And that's taken five or six years for that convergence to happen.

01:33:14.100 You add aerodynamic changes on top of that, and I think it's going to be a fascinating year.

01:33:19.560 What's been the biggest surprise for you this year performance-wise? Has it been

01:33:22.360 the sort of mini sort of performance comeback of McLaren? What has surprised you?

01:33:28.560 We've got a long history with McLaren. I've worked closely with McLaren for a number of years,

01:33:33.220 and it's a team that's had a massive cultural transformation in the last 18 months. And

01:33:38.280 I think you're right. It has been a surprise to see how quickly they've started to turn things around.

01:33:42.720 They're the solid number four team, and they've had some really bad luck,

01:33:47.200 and they're still right there in number four. They really are the best of the rest.

01:33:50.200 Yeah, absolutely. And you can make a case that the traditional private team that's not a

01:33:55.700 manufacturer-owned team could be a truly endangered species in Formula One now. So it's to the credit

01:34:01.980 of everyone at McLaren who's been able to turn that project around, bring in a lot of fresh momentum,

01:34:07.440 fresh blood. And I think they're going back to Mercedes engines in a couple of years.

01:34:11.480 I think their future is looking pretty good at the moment.

01:34:13.500 Luke, this has been awesome. It's so late here in Austin tonight. I'm just glad we got to record

01:34:18.720 this. I knew that it was going to be really hard for us to find a window to talk. So I'm grateful

01:34:23.280 that we've been able to find this one, and I'm grateful for all the insight you've shared with

01:34:26.680 us. And I never get tired of talking about Formula One with you. So thank you for humoring me,

01:34:33.220 continuing the discussion, and doing so in front of a few other people.

01:34:35.780 Yeah, well, we've got a couple more days to dissect a lot more detail about the sport.

01:34:40.440 Can't wait to do so at the track.

01:34:42.220 I appreciate the opportunity, Peter, particularly to talk to a North American audience about this

01:34:46.520 sport because it is traditionally very European-centric. And I think anyone who watches the

01:34:52.600 sport for a couple of months or watches the Netflix documentary gets into a little bit of the

01:34:57.660 soap opera, understands a few of the personalities there. There's a richness there, which is pretty

01:35:03.440 difficult to stop watching once you're into it.

01:35:05.600 I agree. I actually just had this discussion with my wife yesterday is, tell me another

01:35:09.620 professional sport where you can name every athlete.

01:35:12.520 Yeah, indeed.

01:35:13.220 There's only 20 of them. I know every one of them by name. I'd recognize any one of them if I bumped

01:35:17.580 into them in a grocery store or an airport. And as you said, the Netflix special gives you a layer

01:35:23.920 of nuance in the tension that you don't even catch off TV. And it shows you the drama that exists

01:35:29.740 up and down the field, even when it's not about winning the championship.

01:35:32.780 Yeah, very special. Thanks for the opportunity.

01:35:35.880 All right, Luke. I'll see you tomorrow.

01:35:38.020 Indeed. Looking forward to it.

01:35:40.220 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper

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01:38:13.360 Oh, God.

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01:38:21.020 Oh, God.

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01:38:26.200 Oh.

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01:38:32.080 Oh.

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01:38:33.240 Oh, God.

01:38:34.120 Oh, God.

The Peter Attia Drive - March 02, 2020

#95 - Luke Bennett, M.D.： The emotional, cognitive, and physical demands that make Formula 1 a unique and special sport

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